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But You However, Never Give Up
Heresy is going to be as common as dirt throughout the church age ... but you however are as immutable as the Savior in whom you reside ... you do not change!
Avoid Such People
Paul warns Timothy of the folly of false teachers cloaked in the appearance of godliness. His instruction to Timothy is to know the truth of the gospel so that you may recognize error specifically those who deny the power of God.
How We Are to Communicate with the Dead
In these last words of an apostle, who will soon be executed for the convictions of his faith, Paul instructs young Timothy through the guidance of the Holy Spirit to not engage in word wars (v. 14). Church was never meant to be a theological Berkley where every man gets equal air time to espouse what he thinks about metaphysical truth. We are not a people who evolved out of a melting pot of religious ideas. We are a people who are born again through the cleansing effect of God's divinely revealed word. By the power of His Holy Spirit we were created anew in Christ; not as a people of psychology or philosophy, or human speculation, but a people of the word. Which is why we diligently work to rightly handle every verse of Scripture (v. 15). Thus verse 16 ... we avoid irreverent babble, worldly chatter, the speculating ideas of Darwin, Spencer, Skinner, Freud, L. Ron Hubbard, Joseph Smith, or Charles Taze Russell because once you mingle the faulty rhetoric of fallen man with the divinely revealed truth of a holy God, the result is always heresy and it spreads like gangrene (v. 17) causing people to swerve from truth (v. 18) resulting in dishonorable vessels (v. 20) that the Master of this great house cannot and will not use because a steady diet of error is displeasing to a holy God of truth. Thus vessels for honorable use have to be clean ... head (v. 21) and heart (v. 22) then in today's text he deals not with the what of verse 16, or the why of verse 21, but the how of verses 23ff how we are to communicate with spiritually dead men.
Can God Use You?
There is a big difference between an electrician and an eel. An electrician knows all about the flow of electricity ... while an eel experiences the flow of electricity. Now that contrast ... can also be seen in the Christian life. Theologians can accumulate lots of knowledge about the Bible and about the Lord and never experience the power of God's truth within their own life.This is particularly evident in seminaries where non-Christians flaunt a long list of educational degrees in the Bible ...then in classroom will deny the Bible's inerrancy ... sufficiency and authority; and the reason is they have never personally experienced the truth of the Bible in any real sense within their own life. And the same is true within the church. You can have folks attend church all their life ... who know all about the events of the Bible from Adam to Noah to Moses to David to Jesus; they can list the ten commandments; they can name all the disciples and they can quote lots of scriptures yet lack any evidence of regeneration because church has become some-thing they do on Sunday but it has no real impact on their life come Monday: reason is God's truth does not flow through them.
We Don't Bargain
Does what a person believe matter? I can assure you there are parents at Penn State who would say yes; what one man believed destroyed my kid's life. People in Boston would say yes. What 2 young men believed has devastated us. The Bible says: "As a man thinketh in his heart so is he." Proverbs 23:7 So what you believe not only matters to God it matters to man. That's why Paul is in prison. He said what the Greek culture teaches; what the Roman Empire demands; what my former Jewish colleagues embrace cannot be amalgamated into the church without severe damage being done from compromising divine truth with human error and for that Nero will cut off his head.
